


the age of the stag

by allandmore99



Series: the once and future immortal [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy’s Past, Backstory, Gen, Intimacy, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Female/Female Relationships, Platonic Relationships, Scythia, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:09:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27597323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allandmore99/pseuds/allandmore99
Summary: Andy is trying to learn to live and not merely survive, and part of that means letting Nile in. She just didn’t expect Nile to be curious about her childhood, of all things.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko
Series: the once and future immortal [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2017526
Comments: 8
Kudos: 64





	the age of the stag

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to “the care and keeping of your nicky”, and a few parts of it may not fully make sense without reading that first!
> 
> This is very self-indulgent, honestly—I prompted something on the kink meme ages ago about Nile being the first one to ever want to know more about Andy’s past and now I’m engaging in some wish fulfilment and utilising all the knowledge I just gained from reading a whole book about Scythian culture.

For all their fretting, it didn’t take Andy long to decide. She surprised all of them, even herself, with how quickly and easily her mind was made up to try the formula that they had found. She was tired, true, but Nile’s arrival had been a breath of fresh air that had livened up their little group. And then there was Booker, whom she had clearly failed so badly that he had turned to Merrick’s bunch in desperation, who was piecing himself back together but still needed her badly. And of course there was Quynh, alive and free, and Andy had already broken her promise never to leave Quynh once, how could she break it again?

In the end, Andy’s brush with mortality only lasted a little over three years—a tiny blip in her unnaturally long life, but one that nevertheless marked her, inside and out. Never one to shy away from danger even while she didn’t have her immortality to fall back on, she had acquired a collection of scars which she seemed endlessly fascinated by, including the long thin line down one arm where Quynh had cut her to see for herself that she wasn’t healing. Quynh never stopped apologising for that one, in later years, pressing kisses to the silvery band of skin, but Andy always shook her head. Quynh had marked her heart more than any other person she had met in six millennia, she argued. It made sense that she wore her mark openly as well, a reminder of the day when she had first been reunited with Quynh after so many horrible years apart.

Andy had also acquired a few wrinkles at the corner of her eyes and a few strands of grey hair which she was inordinately fond of, feeling that they made her look dignified and mature and like she had lived well.

But her three years of mortality had not only marked her body, but had made her see the world with new eyes. Every battle, every quiet night in with the team, every gentle embrace felt so much more precious when she wasn’t sure if it would be the last time, and somehow that carried through even after she drank the bitter liquid Nile handed her and regained her immortality. 

She was immortal again, yes, but this time she had chosen it, out of love for her family and for the world, and that made a profound difference. Her immortality was no longer a curse tethering her to a world that had long since passed her by, it was something that she had chosen for herself, a gift that allowed her more time to do good in the world and more time with her loved ones. Despite having more practice than anyone in history, she hadn’t been very good at living, before, but she was determined to do better with this fresh chance. Drinking the concoction to regain her immortality had been the easy part of fulfilling her promise to Nicolo to stay around as long as she could—she had to choose her family, again and again, every day, because they deserved all of her, they deserved a boss who remembered how to live and not merely to survive.

Andy had less to make up for with Nile than with the others, or at least she thought so at first. If she hadn’t always been the best mentor to the youngest member of their team, she hadn’t been the worst, either, and it had helped that Nile had really only known her during her mortal years, when she was determined to pass on whatever knowledge she could while she was still able.

But then one day she realised how much of herself she had kept back. She had been happy to teach Nile how to disarm a man with one hand, or how to slip out of different kinds of handcuffs, or how to breathe so slowly that she could play dead, but she had never allowed herself to be truly vulnerable in front of Nile. 

It wasn’t anything personal against Nile—Andy had spent hundreds of lifetimes all alone before she met Quynh, and the loss of Quynh had nearly sapped her of what warmth she had built up over a millennium of being loved. It had taken her centuries to get comfortable enough with Nicky and Joe to rest her head on their shoulders, or to confess to them that she was having trouble sleeping and ask to share their bed. She had never really gotten there with Booker, which in retrospect was probably one of the many failings that had led to him feeling so terribly alone.

Andy might have remained blind a few years—or a few centuries, in all honesty—longer to how little she had opened up to Nile if not for the book incident. Nile loved to read, that was no secret, and she often had books strewn all over whichever safe house they were in. Her love for books wasn’t exactly the same as Booker’s—he was a connoisseur of first editions and truly rare books that were almost like works of art, while Nile could care less about the edition, it was the content that interested her—but it had still been the building block of the budding friendship between the two newest members of their team. 

After Andy had become immortal again, Booker had hugged her close and told her that, now that he didn’t have to worry about losing precious moments with her, he wanted to return to his exile again because he didn’t feel that he had served his time yet. Andy, and especially Nile, had tried to protest, and even Nicky, who had been initially the most furious of all because Booker had gotten Joe hurt, had offered to rescind the punishment, but Booker was adamant that he needed more time to forgive himself for what he had done. Finally, they had compromised—he was on probation, not exile, and he had to check in with them and let them know how he was doing every few months, and he was welcome to come visit as long as he told them ahead of time.

His check-ins with Nile were more like book club sessions, from what Andy could overhear, and they often received lumpy packages addressed from one of his aliases, stuffed full of paperbacks he had picked up for Nile to try out. 

So it wasn’t unusual at all for Andy to walk into the living room, one lazy morning in Oslo, and see Nile curled up on the couch immersed in a hefty tome. What was unusual was for Nile to quickly slam the book shut, shoving it inside a drawer before Andy could see what it was she was reading. Andy raised an eyebrow but knew better than to ask; it would only make Nile flustered and wouldn’t get her the answers she wanted. 

Andy almost forgot about it, in fact, and then a few days later Nile was out with the boys and Andy dropped something off in her room, only to see the book lying there, face up, on Nile’s dresser drawer. Strangely enough, it was the cover illustration that grabbed Andy at first, a golden statue of a fighter on horseback, an image that immediately drew her back several thousands of years to when she had owned jewels just like that, and then she saw the title and she had to sit down on Nile’s bed, her chest feeling tight like something was wrong with her lungs. 

It was a book, a whole book, about her people. Nile was reading about her, about Andy’s earliest days, the millennia when she was all alone, the years she had never really talked about with anyone, not even with Quynh. Andy opened it, glimpsed notes in Nile’s neat handwriting in the margins, proof of how attentive she had been, evidence that choosing this book hadn’t been a lark, that Nile had wanted to  _ know _ —Andy heard the front door open and in a panic she slammed the book shut and took it with her into her own bedroom, hiding it under a pillow, before immediately cursing how foolish she had been. Of course Nile would notice that the book was missing—but maybe she would just think she had misplaced it, maybe Andy would have time to skim through it before slipping it back into Nile’s room.

It was all she could do that night to act normal at dinner with the other three, and she feigned exhaustion as soon as Joe put on the football, retreating back into her room to page through the book. She brushed past the detailed maps which wouldn’t have done her any good because they hadn’t thought of geography in the same way back then, but she paused on some of the illustrations, her fingers reaching out to touch the page, as if she could bring the images to life. She had had a dagger just like this, she remembered, or maybe it was several like it over the years, with a copper blade and a handle carved like a stag. She had almost forgotten about that, how for hundreds of years the stag had become the symbol of her people and she had embellished it on horse hides, carved it into scavenged wood, painstakingly chiselled it out of stone. She had forgotten so much, she realised, setting the book reverently on her nightstand.

Andy waited until the next time the boys were out of the house, and then she approached Nile in the living room, uncorking the bottle she had prepared a few days before. “I made you something,” Andy murmured, handing Nile a small cup. “I’m not sure it’s exactly how we used to make it, I couldn’t remember exactly how it was.” She held out the book, like a peace offering for a feud Nile didn’t yet know about, and watched Nile’s eyes widen. “I’m sorry I looked at your book, but you deserve to know how much it means to me that you were curious. Nobody ever wanted to know before,” she admitted.

Andy swallowed deeply, took a sip of the strong drink. It wasn’t quite right, not after so many years, but it was close enough. “I think I was born somewhere in what’s now Ukraine,” she told Nile softly, trying to remember those earliest days in her village. “I don’t know when I was born,” she remarked a little apologetically. “We didn’t have dates then, really, but I know that my people hadn’t kept horses for very long before I was born. It was soon enough that people still talked about it; the old crones in the village would tell about how in their grandfather’s day, the horses could not be tamed.”

She forced herself to meet Nile’s captivated eyes with her own. “I don’t remember the name of my father, but I remember his smile, and how I used to like to tug at his beard, and how he would lift me up and place me in front of him on his horse. My mother’s name was Tomyris, and it was also the name of my older sister, or one of them anyway. I think I had four or five sisters, but a number of them died in battle when I was quite young.” She took another deep swig of the drink. “My tribe was different than some of the others in that way; our women all went into battle just like our men, and in fact a woman would have been ashamed to have never been in a proper fight, and no respectable man would have wanted to take her as a wife if she was too much of a coward to fight alongside him. In my first battle I was fourteen, and that was when I lost my last sister and both my parents, and then it was just my younger brother and I left.” 

She gave Nile a crooked smile. “I had a husband, you know, before I died the first time. I don’t remember what he was called, and we weren’t married for very long before he was killed, but I remember that he was a kind man and a good fighter, and I was proud to ride with him.” She laughed a little, amazed. “I don’t think I’ve thought about him in a thousand years or more,” she confessed. “All the things I’ve seen and done, I can’t believe I can remember him at all, but I do, or at least I remember that feeling—I don’t recall much of what he looked like, but I remember that he was strong and courageous and I remember that feeling of pride that I had, to call him my husband. And I think—at least I think I remember—that he was proud too that I was his wife.”

“Andy,” Nile said, a little choked up, “would you just come here?” And how could Andy refuse such a simple request, when she was already giving Nile a part of her she hadn’t granted to anyone else? She nodded, setting down her cup and going easily into Nile’s arms, breathing in her fresh scent and resting against her shoulder.

“We mostly stayed in one place then, even though we had horses,” Andy continued, eyes falling shut as she nestled closer to Nile, “we would roam for a few days and then come back to the village. After I died the first time, of course, I could not stay in any one village for long,” she explained, lost in her recollection, and Nile slowly started to card her fingers through Andy’s hair. “I don’t know how long I lived like that, traipsing from place to place. It was a hard, ugly life still, and sometimes I was taken as a slave by a rival band of my people until I suffered a particularly nasty death, and sometimes I was the one who held the other end of the chain, sometimes I was the one dealing out a brutal end to one of my brethren, and it seemed to never end and never change.”

She sighed. “Then there came the cold times, that lasted generations and generations. That was in your book, I saw. For hundreds of years lands which had been plentiful before were caked in frost, and we could no longer stay in one village, we had to take our village with us on the backs of our horses. For me, life was easier that way, because I could travel where I wanted, flitting in and out of people’s lives, and I no longer feared that someone would notice that I never grew old. Life started to become better, slowly—each generation built better weapons, found more brilliant gems, and we began to build the most precious thing of all—traditions and stories, which I watched be passed down from crone to the youngest babes. I was sorry, then, that my family could not see what I saw, that they had not lived to see our people prosper as I had. I watched our kings and queens buried with pomp and circumstance, when my own parents and siblings and husband had simply been lain down in a stone pit, and I felt sorry that I had honoured them so poorly and that they had lived out their short lives in such dark days. I had no idea where I could find their remains anymore, of course, and they would have been long crumbled to dust, but I built them a great tomb anyway, and it might not have had their bones in it but it had everything a great warrior would have wanted—gold carvings, and the choicest portions from the hunt sacrificed to their memory, and the best horses I had, struck down in the prime of their lives so that my family might have them in paradise and ride on a steppe that never ended.” A deep breath, then. “I remembered where that grave was for more than a century, and I returned to it every few years, to add more gold, more intricately crafted weapons, more stallions, and then eventually I forgot the path there, and finally I was able to let them go.”

“And then one day, I dreamt of a woman on a horse, in a far-off corner of the steppe that I had never seen before, a woman who was cut down and who got up again like I did, and all of a sudden I knew that nothing would ever be the same again.” Andy swallowed deeply, her cheek pressed to Nile’s breast as the other woman continued running her fingers through her hair, slowly, slowly. “I was so alone,” she confessed, voice ragged, and Nile’s fingers stilled in her hair for just a moment, and Andy felt a soft kiss there instead. 

“I know,” Nile said, wrapping her arms around Andy and rubbing at her back, and Andy knew instinctively that she really understood, that she knew that Andy didn’t just mean four thousand years ago on the steppe, that she meant all the moments of loneliness in between—the sorrow of being the last of her people, of slowly forgetting the very place she had been born, of seeing the world’s cruelty spin on and on, of losing Quynh and feeling like she still had to continue as the team’s leader, impervious, of each year that had gone by without anyone thinking to ask Andy where she had come from. “Oh, Andy,” Nile whispered. “You don’t ever have to be alone like that again, I promise.”

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I intended to write Andy repairing her relationship with Booker and Quynh, but this came out instead—Book and Quynh will be next! 
> 
> And for anyone who’s read Force Multiplied, I kind of imagined this as the mirror image of how Andy’s past is addressed in the comics...
> 
> Also, everyone please appreciate this wonderful baby! Andy art (definitely not mine, would that I had such skill) which was in my mind as I was writing this: https://mortt-artsy.tumblr.com/post/627823780806426624/andromache-of-scythia


End file.
